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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I don't see battery life as being a small problem on a tablet. My ipad mini (with LTE) has become my primary communication device because I can use it intensively and forget to charge it for days at a time. 12 hours usage in addition to several more days of standby with all the features (push email etc) enabled means I go to my ipad over my blackberry that can't last a day or my mba that can't last a day. 3-4 hours for a portable tablet device is just pathetic. It defeats the whole purpose of the form factor.

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I don't see battery life being a small problem on a laptop either. Once you've experienced 10 hour battery life it's hard to ever give that up.

I found it pretty easy; I went from an asus transformer (14 hours real-world, and I did use it) to a samsung ultrabook-like (<4 hours). Just get in the habit of plugging it in; how much of the day do you really spend away from a power socket? It might not be for everyone, but it's been fine for me.

The moment I need to bring the power cord and adaptor with me, portability goes to "desktop replacement" levels.

People who work on the go need their 8h+ battery life, the more the merrier.

>The moment I need to bring the power cord and adaptor with me, portability goes to "desktop replacement" levels.

Surely you don't just carry a tablet in your hand when walking to the office? Once something's too big for pockets I resort to a messenger bag over my shoulder, in which it's just as easy to include the power. Given that tablets don't seem to come with cases, how else would one transport it?

Working in the office is not working on the go. Working on the go is finish up stuff and send it before boarding a plane, or work on that same plane, or during your train commute.

If you're going from home to the office and back, I don't see the point in carrying anything other than your smartphone. Talking about the general case, obviously, there are justifications for bringing a medium-sized laptop.

I get things done in all those cases on the setup I mentioned. Obviously if you're taking 8-hour flights then you need that much battery, but is that a common case?

It's a very common case that you have a hard time finding a socket in some places. It happens a lot to me that many others are working on their laptops and all sockets are taken, or even that there are no sockets at all in some trains.

Introduces an extra dependency.

My battery life is no where near that terrible. I'm not sure what he has running constantly, but I can GAME on my Surface Pro for 5+ hours without plugging in. It's still bad for a "tablet", but not any worse than my HP Elite Book with the same specs.

Same here. I just put a Surface Pro in one of my Customers' user's hands last week. I tried it out for a couple days as my primary machine and got 5 hours out if the battery the two times I elected to run w/o AC power.

“3-4 hours for a portable tablet device is just pathetic.”

True, but I wouldn’t call the Surface Pro ‘tablet portable’. It’s fairer to compare it with a notebook. With TypeCover, the Surface Pro is 2 centimeters thick, while a MacBook Air 11" has an average thickness of 1 centimeter. The Surface Pro is also a little heavier than a MacBook Air. Curiously, both devices have the same CPU, GPU, SSD, and RAM – but a MacBook Air 11" is $30 cheaper and has 5,5 hours of real world battery life.

If we were to compare Surface Pro with a 10" iPad, it would look even worse. The Surface Pro is twice as thick, 3 times as heavy, has one-third of the battery life, has a screen with a lower resolution, and it’s $300 more expensive.

The MBA 11" is 0.68" thick. The Surface Pro is 0.53" thick. The Type Cover adds .23"; the Touch Cover only .08".

It gets the same run time per charge.

It weighs less, not more; less than 2 pounds versus 2.38.

The difference is that you can snap off the optional keyboard in a split second if you really care about thickness -- well, that and the fact that it's a tablet with a touch digitizer behind the glass too.

> The MBA 11" is 19.2mm thick

No, it’s not: “Height: 0.11-0.68 inch (0.3-1.7 cm)” http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html

The body has a wedge shape, on average 10mm thick: http://imgur.com/Ung7IQ3

> It gets the same run time per charge.

No, it doesn’t. The Surface Pro gets 3,75 hours of battery life. http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/05/microsoft-surface-pro-rev...

For what conceivable purpose would you want to compare average thickness? I own an SP; it does not get 3.75 hours of battery life no matter what I do with it, and I could pull out a dozen review links to say that as well. Why are you trying so hard to make it look worse than it is?

“For what conceivable purpose would you want to compare average thickness?”

Along with length, width and depth, that’s what determines the volume of the object (=portability). The Surface Pro has 60% more volume as a MacBook Air 11". And yet, it gets hot, has loud fans, and has less battery life. That’s just bad engineering. As a replacement for a notebook and a tablet, it really should have at least as much battery life as an iPad. Given its volume, that would’ve been possible.

Surface Pro: 10.81 x 6.81 x 0.76" = 55.95 cubic inches

MacBook Air 11": 11.8 x 7.56 x 0.39" = 34.79 cubic inches

EDIT: in an earlier version I mistakenly wrote 'mass' where I meant 'volume'.

Weight and size are what determine portability for everyone else, not how much water it could hold if it were doubling as a canteen. That's not mass, it's volume, by the way. The MBA is longer, wider, taller and heavier -- yet you've contrived a way to label that as "more portable"... ridiculous on its face.

I'm not going to make this valueless discussion thread any longer, so to your reply: those numbers are made up. Larger screens make things less portable, not more.

The MBA is less than an inch longer and wider (because of the larger screen). It’s not as thick (‘tall’?) as the Surface Pro and it weighs less (2.38lbs) than a Surface Pro with TypeCover (2.55lbs).

That's 3.75 hours with a video continuously looping.

I get 6 - 7 hours on a low brightness with normal usage (web, email, visual studio, sql server, etc.)

When they performed the same test on a 13" MacBook Air, it held on for 6.5 hours. That jibes with Apple’s stated battery life of ‘Up to 7 hours wireless web’. Apple states the MBA 11" has battery life of ‘Up to 5 hours wireless web’, so it’s definitely more than 3.75 hours.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/06/18/macbook-air-review/

The surface pro is intended to converge tablets and notebooks. That's why you'd put up with the sub par keyboard and touchpad. If you're going to consolidate to one device, then the battery life matters more than it does when you augment a notebook with a separate tablet.

Brent the author here. I agree that battery life isn't a small problem - note that I put (?) next to "small" as a way of noting that the problems aren't nitpicking.

I don't know what he's doing to get that kind of battery life. I've had my SP for a few months now, and it consistently gets 5-6 hours of actual usage, even heavy things like streaming HBO. It's not 12+, but there's a Core i5 behind the glass, and my Core i5 laptop doesn't get half that running time.

Brent the author here. I'm doing basic productivity work while listening to music, doing email, and leaving Twitter & Hipchat open. Engadget and The Verge both noted sub-4-hour battery life in their reviews too. I'm glad you're getting more life though.

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